//------------------------------// // Chapter 21: And Did Something Else // Story: Through the Aurora // by Starscribe //------------------------------// Theo didn’t get to go on the expedition to retrieve the airship. It wasn’t anything personal—even Sharp Edge wasn’t able to go. The team the blue pegasus brought wasn’t so much a group of trained experts as a dozen pegasus ponies from halfway across Equestria. If it was Theo’s airship, she probably would’ve told the pegasus “no thanks” at that point. But Sharp seemed to recognize some of them, and the knowledge made him more willing to let them make the trip. There was no more work to do around the farm, but the Apples didn’t kick them out. They still had the run of the barn, and meals when they wanted them, leaving Sharp to use the lion’s share of their bits for whatever repairs might be required. “Assuming we can even fix her,” he muttered, whenever the Apples weren’t close enough to hear. “There’s a chance we won’t be able to get even one of her engines working. In that case… guess we just tow her out to a field somewhere. Wonder if there’s anywhere we could park it long term while I save up for a replacement engine.” “Jet engines aren’t that hard,” Theo answered. “Some friends and I made one for a bicycle in metal shop. If we can do that, you can fix yours.” “A jet engine,” he repeated. “Like those designs in your notebook. The strange… empty loop of metal that air passes through. That actually does something?” “It produces thrust. I don’t know how it compares to the efficiency of what you were using before. Some kind of… internal combustion. They’re at least as efficient under the right conditions, I can promise you that.” “Well, here’s hoping I won’t need your help to build one,” Sharp said. “I’m… not entirely optimistic about the prospects. I shouldn’t have let that pony talk me into it. That’s exactly why I stay away from cider.” The airship arrived the next day, kept aloft by a full gasbag and struggling pegasus ponies alike. As soon as they let off on the heavy lines, the whole thing sagged, shuddering down to land with a rough thump behind the Apple family barn. Several birds took off from the nearest trees, calling out with agitation as the gigantic object suddenly broke their sky. Theo watched from inside the barn as Sharp emerged to speak with the crew, circling the Horizon with them. Its hull was flat enough for it to land standing up, though it was still soaking wet and water trailed from inside even now. Bits of debris had fallen across the gasbag, which seemed to only half-inflate. The worst damage by far was on the engines hanging off the side, which were two hunks of rough scrap now. Incredibly complicated, internal-combustion scrap built by a single eccentric inventor. When Sharp finally returned, he looked disheartened. “There’s, uh… basically nothing salvageable in either engine,” he said. “Plumbing is shot, gasbag has holes. Celestia help us if I want to fix the deck wherever there was water damage, because that’s another thousand bits of lumber…” Summer reached out, settling one of her wings on his shoulder with a comforting pressure. Sharp looked up but didn’t push her away. “How much do we have?” “Five hundred bits,” he said. “Or thereabouts.” “And how much would it cost to get us into the air, minimum?” “Repairs to the gasbag… that’s one hundred gone. Another fifty if I buy scrap wood from Applejack to fix the rudder and some of the mechanical steering. But I couldn’t replace the engines for twice that, not if I had all the time in the world to work. And… as generous as this family has been, we don’t have that time. We’re completely bucked.” “Unless…” Theo let go of him, hurrying over a few steps into her stall, removing the sketchbook and flipping through it to her simple turbojet engine. “What if instead of two engines that hung out the side, we just built one of these, which could live right inside a stripped-down lower section. What if we built this? Could you put this together for… three hundred fifty bits?” Sharp Edge stared down at the drawings for a long time, expression screwed up in concentration. Finally, he looked up. “I can’t tell why this would work, Summer. The propellers are internal, and it hardly does anything to convert the fuel into motion. There are no gears, no pistons, no…” She pushed his mouth closed with one of her wings. “It’s the simplicity that makes them so powerful. All we have to do is get our fuel into the air and ignite it at the right temperature. Heat pushes air out the back, spinning the fan to compress new air coming in. They work, I promise. Way smarter people than me came up with these over a hundred years of engineering.” Sharp Edge held up the sketchbook again, squinting at the turbine with its many intricate blades. This was the most complicated part of any design, and the part with the least tolerance. If even one of those little fan-blades snapped off while the engine was in motion, the rest of its internal parts would explosively disassemble like a shotgun in all directions. “What is this even made of?” he finally asked. “This fan and shaft here, this is the most complex. I see… a hundred blades, in just a few types. Could cast these, perhaps, work them together by magic. But I don’t think I could build it from steel.” “No,” Theo agreed. “The turbines are made of aluminum… I think alloyed with copper, but I’m not sure about the ratios. That’s metallurgy, and that was never my thing. The whole object is aluminum except this part right here.” She pointed at the combustion chamber. “There’s going to be heat and pressure in there unlike anything you’ve ever seen in a combustion engine. I don’t know, maybe you could make this part from steel. But they made the engines back home from titanium.” He dropped the sketchbook. “So, to summarize all that—you want me to build a single engine that can produce more thrust than two propellers. It’s going to be made of material so weak they use it to make food cans, cast into shapes not even as thick as my hoof, all running into a vessel made of… a metal I’ve never even heard of.” He dusted off the notebook, passing it back to her. “That sounds completely insane. Do you have any internal combustion designs we could use instead?” “Well…” She winced. “They’re actually more complicated.” She gestured out the open door, to where one of the old engines hung off the ship like a tumor. “Think about all the pipes and tubes and timings. I know the basics about how they work—but not enough to fix one. When my car broke down, I hired a mechanic.” “You hired a mechanic to help with your combustion engines, designs so advanced that almost nopony in Equestria understand how they work—but you made a ‘turbojet’ in ‘metal shop,’ a design so advanced it looks like it won’t do anything at all but waste our bits, even if we can build it.” “It’s the best method there is for somepony in our position,” Theo said, settling down onto her haunches and folding her wings flat against her back. “It’s your airship, so I won’t tell you what to do. But what I will do is promise you that it’ll work. We could probably simplify the turbines quite a bit, ignore this second fan here, get rid of the bypass. It would cost us in fuel economy, but I don’t think your last engines cared about that either.” “This one engine,” Sharp repeated, “will make up for two of the most advanced combustion engines ever built, running at the same time.” “Yes,” she said, without hesitation. “Think about how much lighter we’ll be without your huge engines—this one is mostly aluminum, and it’s the whole thing. No separate propeller assembly. The only tricky part is figuring out how to mount it so it pushes the whole ship, instead of ripping out or tearing the Horizon in half. But I’m sure you can figure that out. You’re obviously a great engineer.” “Blacksmith,” he said, ears flat. “I’m just a blacksmith.” “Liar.” He looked like he might argue, but in the end, he just sighed. He picked up the sketchbook, flipping through it again, and eventually settling on the design. “I’ll need your help with this. Maybe not hammering out everything in the forge with me, but… nopony has ever built anything like this. And I still don’t know if it will even work.” “We could build a little model to let me prove it to you,” Theo said. “But that will probably take a few days at least, maybe longer. Do you want to waste all that time?” “No,” he finally said, defeated. “Alright, Summer Ray. This is… the most insane thing I’ve ever done. More than giving up my whole life to travel the world with a stranger I barely know. If it doesn’t work…” He didn’t sound angry, but utterly defeated. “I’m not sure what I’ll do. But…” His eyes widened suddenly, and he darted out the open barn doors. Fast enough that Emerald poked her head out from her stall, looking concerned. “Is… something wrong?” “I’ll find out,” she muttered, following Sharp. She didn’t gallop, mostly because she just couldn’t go that fast with claws. But the airship had been parked just beside the open doors for good reason, and so soon enough she was beside him. Sharp Edge had started ripping his precious engines apart, or at least removing the outer shell to expose the mechanical inner-workings inside. “I have no idea about your design,” he said, taking a wrench off his belt and going to work loosening something.  “Maybe it’s brilliant, I have no idea. But I know manufacturing tolerances when I see them, and I couldn’t build your thing. But… you gave me an idea. Just one engine, tucked away in the middle, instead of one on each side. Well, both my engines are melted—but they didn’t melt the same way. I bet between the two of these, there are enough intact parts to make one that works. That will cut our top speed quite a bit, we won’t be the fastest thing in the air by a longshot anymore. But she’ll be infinitely faster than the zero she can manage right now.” He turned, leaning past Theo. “Emerald! Emerald, I need your help!” She emerged from inside the barn seconds later—probably she’d already been on her way. She stopped right in front of them, saluting with one wing. “Yes, master Sharp Edge?” “You and Summer should go to the deck and remove the cargo crate marked ‘12’. The drill press is in there—get it down here and assembled, just how it was in Sleighsburg. You’re right, Summer. I’m not just a blacksmith. But I’m not an engineer either, I’m a machinist. It’s time to go to work.” As much as Theo wanted to be there for her companion, there was very little she could do for Sharp after that. Moving heavy crates took only a few minutes—there weren’t that many to unload, or else they wouldn’t have fit on the Horizon in the first place—and soon enough her presence beside the wrecked ship would just get in the way. For the first few days of the repair, she haunted the workshop like a ghost, assisting Emerald the way Emerald helped Sharp. But quickly enough it became obvious that her presence there was only slowing everything down—maybe Sharp didn’t have the heart to send her away, but he clearly wanted to, and so eventually she left the machinist to his work. There were other things to do on the Horizon, things that didn’t require technical skill. She braved the Apple farmhouse to ask for advice, and soon Applejack was leading her up the ramp—past the pair of totally stripped engines and the makeshift harness going up for the single replacement—and into the chamber they affectionately referred to as “belowdecks.” Applejack whistled quietly to herself as she saw the comfortable living quarters—or what had been, now destroyed. The cloth was torn, the wood warped, and the pipes ripped right off the wall. It didn’t seem like the plumbing or the electric lights would be working again anytime soon. “You sure are in need of a handymare,” Applejack said. “I don’t suppose that’s you. Wait, I can guess. With the way you pulled the cart, I’m gonna throw a horseshoe out into the dark and say that you never would’ve worked a day in your life if it wasn’t for us. It’s alright—nothin’ to be ashamed of.” She nodded grimly. “Where I come from, how strong I was never mattered. It was all about how smart you were, how resourceful and clever and diligent. But this room doesn’t just need clever. Do you know how to…” She gestured at the soggy floor. “Did you ask Sharp how his airship got this way?” She shook her head. “Can’t say I thought it was my business. And to be honest, I had my doubts about the story. Fewer questions I asked meant fewer times he had to lie. It’s only polite.” “Well… we don’t know why we got attacked, but I’m pretty sure it was because of me. He’s flown all over the world in this thing, and only when I’m with it is he worth bombing out of the air. It feels like… I should be doing something to try and make it up to him. Do you think you could… show me what to do, to fix this place? I don’t need you… doing much work, or even any of it really. Just giving me instructions. I may not be as strong as an earth pony, but I’m determined to make this right.” Applejack circled her once in the tight bedroom. She nudged a window pane, and it wiggled completely out of its metal mounting. She caught it—narrowly—settling it onto the ground at their hooves. She ran one of her hooves against the wood floor, until bits of warped wood started flaking away. “See this?” she asked, pointing down at the spot.  Theo leaned down to look. “This is all warped on top—but it wasn’t in the water long enough to really soak in. Down below the surface, there’s strength left. This was a strong tree once… spruce, if I’m not wrong. And I’m probably not. Don’t spend your whole life around trees without learning a thing or two about them. I think we could make something of this yet. You’ve got the bits now for what you’ll need, but it isn’t much. Most of what you’ll need is just hard work. There’s no substitute, not on this side of Seaquestria or yours.” “Yes!” she said. Practically screamed, except that then she’d alert Sharp far below. He was barely aware of anything outside his world of broken engines and new parts, and she wanted it to stay that way. Applejack wasn’t exaggerating when she said that it would be mostly hard work. Summer went into town to buy a few things from Barnyard Bargains, but most of her time was spent in the former bedroom. She cleared away broken furniture and hopelessly ruined blankets, then went to work. She stripped away the damaged wood, smoothed and sanded entirely by claw, then lacquered and varnished. Applejack was an exacting taskmaster, but at least she knew how to fix things made of wood.  By the time Sharp had completely disassembled both of his engines and started mapping out how he would assemble them into one, Theo had finished with the walls and floors and went to work on the pipes. Then came the wires, and the much-needed research into pony electrical systems. It was a trip she’d wanted to make anyways, given that she had now been in Ponyville for well over a month, and whatever fears she’d initially felt about an imminent arrest were clearly erroneous. Maybe the ambassador didn’t care, or maybe he’d just been so thoroughly convinced of the bluff that he didn’t plan on investigating. Either way, Theo had seen a single structure rising above Ponyville’s opposite side, one that made even city hall look like a child’s toy. It seemed to be built from the same almost-glass that the skyscrapers of the Crystal Empire were constructed from, only instead of looking like real buildings this designer had built the whole thing into an absurd rendition of a tree. How or why someone would go to such lengths, Theo didn’t really know or care. What mattered was that there was a library inside, and she needed to check out a few things. She didn’t want to go alone—but Sharp was in his own way an even more exacting taskmaster than Applejack. Rather than pop into the room twice a day to check on her, Sharp was beside Emerald all the time, and needed her constantly. “But he’ll be done with me soon, I’m sure. Once we finish taking apart the old engine mounts and put in the new one, it will be all reassembling the one good engine. He hasn’t let me touch it once, and I’m pretty sure that won’t change. I could go with you then!” “Sure,” Theo promised. “We’ll go then.” And they would, but she hoped to be completely done with her repairs before that happened. Sharp Edge might be so focused on the engines that he barely saw the real world anymore, but Emerald could pierce that veil, and she would the instant she bothered to walk up the stairs of the Horizon and look around. Theo arrived at the library early one morning, wearing her empty saddlebags and carrying some bits just in case. She’d been to plenty of libraries on Earth and never had to pay, but there was no way to know. Maybe they’d see that she didn’t live here and demand she pay some fee. But the incredible tree-castle-whateveritwas wasn’t just a library, but something else as well. There were burly stallions standing at the base, wearing golden armor like those she’d seen from Canterlot’s police. They eyed her as she approached, though none of them stopped her. Until she got close enough to talk, and the orange one opened his mouth. “Ooh, a real hippogriff! Are you here to negotiate an important treaty with the princess? What’s it’s like to live underwater? Do you like flying or swimming more?” She stopped dead, eyes widening with confusion and a little concern. But she’d much rather have an overzealous pony who didn’t understand the first thing about what was really going on than one that would drag her off to an insane asylum. “No treaty,” she said, slowing down just a little out of politeness. “I hear the library is in here, is that still true?” The guard held the door open for her. “Sure is! Along with the princess’s castle. Most of that is off limits, except for the throne-room if there’s no court in session. There are tours on Mondays and Fridays if you want one.” “I’ll have to come back for one,” she said, hurrying away before the guard could remember her face, or else change his mind and decide to attack. He did neither as she wrapped the loop of stairs around the “trunk” of the crystal tree. That was the downside of such an outwardly spectacular design from such a primitive culture: they apparently lacked any elevators suited to a building like this. But they should have them, right? They have combustion engines and steam engines and cables, so…  Theo wasn’t here to consider the strange hodgepodge of pony technologies, but to search for the specific information required to revive some of her toys. Theo circled the inside of the strange castle’s tower (trunk?), walking around and around and ignoring the obvious empty shaft running directly up the center. Evidently the place had been built with flyers in mind, though the sort of motions that the flyers did still amazed her. Emerald could take off from a total standstill, accelerate to incredible speeds, stop almost instantly—her flight performance was almost magic. She was getting distracted again. Theo emerged from the steps a moment later, into a spacious mezzanine of polished crystal. It all looked like one single, flawless geode, as though it had grown this way right out of the ground. How such things could even exist defied simple understanding. But clearly they did, and she was walking through one. If this stupid thing caves in on me while I’m inside it, I’m going to haunt it until the end of time. One thing the strange castle didn’t have were direction signs. But there was a little lizard creature, holding several books under its arms and hurrying somewhere. Where would you hurry with all those books if not into the library?  “Wait!” Theo jogged after him, catching up after just a few steps. Each step was slightly painful on her ears—sharp claws striking the floor like it was glass. But however much it might sound like it would shatter on her, there was no sign of cracks or even scratches at her steps. The lizard did stop, looking up at her with a friendly, slightly strained expression. “I’m sorry, but Twilight needs me in the library. I can’t give tours right now.” He started walking again, but Theo hurried along behind him. “That’s perfect! The library is where I was hoping to go. Could you lead me there?” “Oh, sure.” He relaxed, slowing his desperate scramble just a bit. “I just assumed, since you’re a hippogriff and all, you’d be here for the tour.” “Wish I had time,” she said, reaching up to finger briefly at her necklace. “My whole visit to Equestria feels like it’s been rushed, or… more like I’m seeing something I shouldn’t. That it might be snatched away any second, and I’ll be dragged back to reset servers and unplug cables until I die.” “That bad, huh?” The lizard’s smile was sympathetic. “Every time I get annoyed with whatever Twilight has for me, something comes along to remind me it could be worse.” They ascended another set of steps together, though this one was just one flight. There was a large open doorway up ahead—the floor above was much larger than the narrow trunk, in ways that would’ve given any structural engineer a stroke. But a familiar smell drifted down those steps, one that Theo had sensed vanishingly rarely. The smell of many old books, quietly moldering away. It was the smell of comfortable afternoons, and a refuge from those who didn’t approve of her choices. An artifact that her children, if she ever had any, would probably never know. “Sorry,” Theo said lamely. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m just here for books, not here to make it hard for other people to sleep.” “Well we’ve got books,” he said. “And it must be important if you felt the need to come all the way out here for it. Guess it makes sense. Mt. Aris got raided, and books must not do well underwater. Do you write on shells, or…?” “I’ve never been there,” she said, without thinking. “So, I have no idea.” Then they crested the stairs, into the library. For the vastness of the castle, it was surprisingly modest—a two story room with a balcony running around the top. There were chairs and benches scattered in the center of a space lined with shelves, chairs made of crystal that looked about as comfortable to sit on as cement. But books were books, and this place had more than she’d seen since the Crystal Empire. Hopefully what I need hasn’t been snatched away like the charts. Now that she thought about it, that event was probably connected too. Someone or something didn’t want anyone finding their way back to the hippogriff city. There was a single pony at the top of the stairs, a purple one with an impatient look on her face. She seemed at a glance like the sort of person who belonged in a library—her hair was slightly bookish, and her eye-contact with the lizard-thing wasn’t the best. She was more occupied with work spread out on one of the tables. “Spike, fantastic. I’ve gone over the whole catalogue, and if I’m not mistaken those three books are the last…” “Oh, uh… was that today?” She whimpered, and a nearby roll of parchment lifted from the table. A checklist, though Theo couldn’t read what was on it at such a distance. Her wings ruffled out beside her the same way Emerald’s did whenever she was agitated, some subconscious attempt to make herself bigger and more threatening. Spike—apparently that was the creature’s name—set the pile of books in one corner of the table, then rolled his eyes. “Whatever you’re thinking, it’s wrong. She doesn’t seem like she’s here on a diplomatic mission—I’m not sure she even came from Mt. Aris. Didn’t you say you’d never been there, uh…” “Summer,” she said weakly. She could practically see that pony’s head spinning. Whoever she was, she must be important. Ponies with horns and wings both were special, she’d been in Equestria long enough to know that. Whether it was religiously special, or just some formal nobility, she didn’t know. But she tried to look as respectful as she could. “I’m not on any mission. I just wanted to look through your library for books about electrical engineering. You’ve got electricity, but my friend here barely knows anything about it.” Her request seemed like a magic spell for the way it made the pony rise with her, grinning from ear to ear. “Well, I know I shouldn’t, but I’m always happy to help a pony use the library. Let’s see what we can find.”